Scientists point to Bannon’s time as a manager of Biosphere 2 as proof that he understands climate science.

The Biosphere 2 structure in Tucson, AZ

Carol M. Highsmith/Getty Images

Before Steve Bannon was Donald Trump’s campaign advisor, a right-wing media mogul, or a conservative Hollywood documentarian, he helped a group of climate scientists steer a controversial experiment in the Arizona desert back from financial chaos. Twenty-five years ago, a New Agey-experiment called Biosphere 2 set out to recreate life on another planet with eight people locked in a giant glass habitat. But it ended bitterly with allegations of financial fraud, scientific goof-ups, and a power struggle outside the dome.

Now some of the scientists who worked on Biosphere 2 hope that Bannon---who has been dogged by allegations of ties to the white nationalist alt-right movement---might steer Trump back from the edge of climate denial, and perhaps forge a better deal between the US and other nations intent on reducing heat-trapping greenhouses gases. That might seem far-fetched for someone whose website, Breitbart News, calls climate change a hoax and those who study it corrupt. But these scientists point to Bannon’s time as a successful turn-around manager of Biosphere 2 in the mid-1990s as proof that he understands climate science---and may not be as much of a climate denial zealot as the folks who write for his website.

Biosphere 2 was designed to replicate life on Earth. Inside a massive enclosed glass structure, environmental scientists built separate chambers or biomes stocked with plants from desert, forest, grassland, and ocean habitats. They wanted to create a self-sustaining ecosystem---90 feet high, with 3.14 acres under glass---that required no inputs from the outside. If the researchers could figure out how to keep the giant hothouse sustainable, perhaps they could one day grow food on the Moon, Mars, or a long-distance space journey.

Funded by billionaire Ed Bass, Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1 being planet Earth) got off to an auspicious beginning in 1991. Eight so-called biospherians---four men and four women dressed in matching blue jumpsuits---embarked on a two-year "mission" inside the dome, along with 4,000 plant and animal species. The crew maintained daily contact with scientists and managers through a direct video link, but otherwise slept, ate, and worked together just as they would on a separate planet. The scientific mission was to see if the team could grow their own food, keep the flora and fauna alive, and maintain a balanced air supply.

After a while, weird ecological things started happening. The atmospheric oxygen levels inexplicably dipped from 20 percent to below 15 percent, forcing the project's doctor to pump almost 21,000 pounds of liquid oxygen into the dome. The crew couldn't raise enough food, and lost weight. Fish and pollinating species died, while ants and cockroaches proliferated and took over the three-acre ship-in-a-bottle. One biospherian who left the habitat for medical reasons may have returned with duffels stuffed with supplies.

Steve Bannon backstage after a campaign event for Donald Trump in Phoenix, AZ on October 29, 2016.

Carlo Allegr/REUTERS

After the crew of eight emerged in September 1993, the scientists set out to fix the atmosphere problems. Two scientists at Columbia University figured out that microbes in the soil were consuming excess organic matter and respiring extra carbon dioxide, while the biosphere's exposed beams were consuming the CO2 along with an extra oxygen molecule from the air and turning it into calcium carbonate.

With the case of the missing oxygen solved, the Biosphere managers recruited a second team of biospherians. But that’s when things got weird outside the dome. All of the changes had put the Biosphere an estimated $20 million in debt. So Bass, the owner, hired Bannon---then a Wall Street investment banker a few years out of the Navy---to right the struggling bio-ship.

Biosphere Bannon

Bannon was all business. In late 1993, he audited the books and submitted a plan that called for removing the on-site managers. Bannon left the Biosphere 2 project in September 1993, but returned when Bass decided to put Bannon in charge and stop cost overruns on the order of $1 million per month.

On April 1, 1994, Bannon arrived at the facility outside Oracle, AZ, with a pair of federal marshals to enforce a court order turning the whole place over to him. Inside, the biospherians were inside taking air samples, feeding the remaining animals, and running environmental science experiments. Bannon hired off-duty police to patrol the site and keep the ousted leadership away. But two former biospherians who had been fired in the Bannon coup, Abigail Alling and Mark Van Thillo, broke the seal to warn the new crew that they were in danger---they believed Bannon was going to cut funds that maintained the environmental systems. Alling wrote a five-page memo detailing her concerns, a memo that Bannon later threatened to “ram down her – throat.”

The dispute got legally nasty. Bannon pursued criminal charges against Alling and Van Thillo, while the pair sued over their dismissal. Eventually, the former leadership dispersed. Alling and Van Thillo formed an environmental research group called the Biosphere Foundation, and sailed the Pacific in a boat called Mir. Bannon took over and continued to improve operations at the biosphere.

“There was mistrust and probably some poor management of the finances by the people who were in there before,” says Tony Burgess, one of the few scientists who worked for both Bannon and the former leadership. The biosphere's culture, at the beginning, was that of idealistic space hippies building a better world. But Bannon shifted the focus, as a clear-eyed financier of climate research. “Steve came in and tried to change it around," says Burgess. "It was costing $3 million a year just to cool the place, and the idea was to see how could it pay for itself. That began a long struggle to see how a closed system could justify itself in mainstream terms.”

Bannon never expressed personal opinions about climate change, but he did sell the idea of Biosphere 2 as a climate laboratory to the press and potential investors, including in a 1995 interview with C-SPAN. “What a lot of the scientists who are studying global change and the effects of greenhouse gases, many of them feel the Earth’s atmosphere in 100 years is what Biosphere 2’s atmosphere is today,” Bannon said in the interview. “This allows them to study the impact of enhanced CO2 on humans, plants, and animals.”

With the Biosphere 2 bleeding money, Bannon decided to shut down the crew habitat. He persuaded a timber company to remove one of the biomes and replant it with poplar trees in one habitat to measure how quickly commercially harvested trees would grow in a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. “They shot right up,” says Burgess. At times, Burgess said, carbon dioxide levels reached up to 4,000 parts per million inside the biosphere, ten times current levels on Earth.

Bernd Zabel, who managed construction of the dome in the late 1980s and spent six months inside the dome, compared Bannon to a “hot-shot” fireman who parachutes into a forest fire. “Everyone understood his mission,” says Zabel, now a retired engineer living in the Tucson area. “He was sent in by the owner to see what can be done with Biosphere 2. Steve was the one with idea to get more scientists involved.” With more than 100 employees, Biosphere 2 wasn’t just a backyard fantasyland. It added a conference center, café, and links to academia.

“I liked him,” said Zabel. “We had a good working relationship. He was fair. He was type-A personality on overdrive. He was breathing, sweating, thinking Biosphere 2. There was nothing else.”

After the Storm

Bannon left Biosphere 2 after Columbia University agreed to take over management of the facility, which is now run by the University of Arizona. In the two decades since then, Bannon made a lot of money on Wall Street and became enamored of right-wing politics. He produced flattering films about Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Ronald Reagan. And more recently, he's taken over as publisher of Breitbart News, giving a platform to populist and white nationalist viewpoints, critics say. He outlined his political views in a 2014 talk in Vienna and the “global war against Islamic fascism.”

People’s views change over time, and it’s possible that Bannon’s understanding of the science of climate change has now drifted into climate denial. InsideClimateNews recently documented the connections between Bannon, Breitbart articles, and fossil-fuel executives working against climate regulations. But the researchers he worked with at Biosphere 2 nearly 25 years ago seem to have hope that Bannon may be less ideological than he appears.

Bruno Marino, an isotopic chemist who helped track atmospheric compounds inside Biosphere 2, spent a lot of time working with Bannon in 1994 and 1995. He remembers him keeping a private office at the Arizona compound stocked with dozens books about climate science, including The Biosphere, a 1926 book by Russian mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky that first sketched out the scientific theory that living things, including humans, can change the planet, just as much as geological or physical forces.

“At the time I didn’t think much of it,” says Bruno, who now runs a small environmental consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass., and last saw Bannon about 10 years ago. “It may mean he was interested in climate issue more broadly. I don’t know. I hope maybe he will have some role to play in Trump’s climate policy moving forward.”

Bannon’s statements on politics, race, and religion have been dissected for clues of what a Trump White House will do in the coming four years. The question is whether Trump’s climate policies will reflect the views of Brietbart Bannon---or Biosphere Bannon.

Before Steve Bannon was Donald Trump’s campaign advisor, a right-wing media mogul, or a conservative Hollywood documentarian, he helped a group of climate scientists steer a controversial experiment in the Arizona desert back from financial chaos. Twenty-five years ago, a New Agey-experiment called Biosphere 2 set out to recreate life on another planet with eight people locked in a giant glass habitat. But it ended bitterly with allegations of financial fraud, scientific goof-ups, and a power struggle outside the dome.

Steve Bannon backstage after a campaign event for Donald Trump in Phoenix, AZ on October 29, 2016.